Forum Rules & Social Guidelines

Social Guidelines

The Secret World bulletin board is a place for players to talk about the game, discuss and share knowledge, and engage in role-playing. The general topic for the bulletin board is the game and the community around The Secret World.

In order to maintain the boards and be able to provide feedback, we must reserve the right to enforce certain standards and rules. Please understand that this bulletin board is owned and operated by Funcom. It is a privately run message board, and all rules are enforced at our discretion.

Alias

Your alias should be short and unique to easily identify you and set you apart from others. The rules for your alias are:

Keep it to 15 characters or less.

Use only letters, numbers (0-9), space ( ), hyphen (-) and underscore (_) in the alias.

Avoid offensive aliases.

Funcom and the forum moderators reserve the right to enforce name changes on aliases that are deemed inappropriate. Understand that refusing to respect these name changes can result in infractions or suspension from the forums.

Signature

Your signature is a good place for including some info about yourself, a quote you like, or links to your characters. The signature should not take the attention away from the posts though, and thus we have these rules for signatures:

Limit it to a maximum of 10 lines, including any empty lines.

Use normal text size or smaller. I.e. no [size=x] tags with x > 2.

Don't overdo the colors and smileys.

Avoid the [quote] tag, as it takes up a lot of space.

Do

Following are some guidelines that you should keep in mind when posting. Remember that the general topic on the bulletin board is The Secret World.

Post in English, using proper mixed case and punctuation. A single exclamation mark (!) or question mark (?) is enough.

Please write as if you were speaking directly to another human being. If you have a character-driven reason to write in a certain manner, please do so in roleplay threads or in threads where it's otherwise stated as accepted.

Use a relevant, specific and descriptive subject for a thread. "I was thinking of something" and "Here's an idea" are not good topics.

Stay on topic. When posting a new thread, make sure it fits into the topic of the forum. When replying to a post, make sure to stay on the topic of the thread you're posting in.

Be constructive and back up your statements. If quoting, make sure to quote all relevant text, and if needed, provide a link to the source.

Pay the moderators and other volunteers proper respect. They spend their spare time to assist and improve The Secret World community.

Be nice, especially to newcomers. Let people become acquainted with the environment and do beginners' mistakes without patronizing them. Please respect that people may have a different political, religious, philosophical, and cultural background than you.

Play fair. Be truthful and respect other people's privacy. Do not misrepresent or impersonate others.

Have fun! That's why we're all here. Just remember to have fun with others, not at the expense of others.

Don't

This is a list of things you should not do on our bulletin board. If you do any of this, you might find your access to the bulletin board closed, possibly permanently.

Flame. Flaming is verbally attacking people or groups of people - e.g. a profession, an organisation, a company. Name-calling and defamatory comments are typical examples of flaming.

Rant. Ranting is posting irate and normally unconstructive comments. It's normally used to let out frustration, but also as a form of trolling.

Troll. Trolling is posting to provoke others, luring them to flame or rant. Trolling is sometimes done involuntary, so please be considerate when posting.

Spam. Spamming is posting the same thing several times, or posting without any real content. "Bumping" (posting to move a thread up on the forum list) and cross-posting (posting the same thread in several forums) are examples of spam.

Fight. Taking a personal conflict to the bulletin board is not needed. Allow those not involved to avoid having to see it.

Use profanity. Please respect other users and do not use foul language and profanity in your posts. This includes trying to 'mask' such language by substituting letters or symbols.

Necromancy Raise threads long dead. Necromancy should be saved for Necromancers, not forums posts.

Be a jerk The Golden Rule of our forums and enforcement is "Don't Be A Jerk."

Post Exploits. If you discover something in-game that could be seen as an exploit, do not post on these forums about it. To report an exploit or exploit-like behavior, please go to help.funcom.com and send in an email with the tag "Exploit", or report, via Private Message, what you have experienced to one of the Community Managers.

Before starting a thread, take a look around the forums and see if the issue is being discussed elsewhere. There'll usually be one or two threads with most of the activity there, and spin-offs that don't merit their own thread will be closed quickly.

On a related note, do not make parody threads, especially centered on hot topics. They're probably not funny and a good way to inflame the situation further.

If someone is flaming you or otherwise acting like a jerk, the Report button is the best way to get our attention. We understand things can get heated at times, but nasty retorts and counter-flaming are a good way to get an entire thread closed and both sides suspended/banned.

We ask you not to discuss politics or religion on the forums. For the purposes of these rules, discussions on race and national origin (excepting, of course, in game race/national origin) will fall under the banner of "politics".

We ask you not to discuss warez and other illegal activity.

Catchphrases, memes, image macros, Rickrolls, and other such Internet tomfoolery are funny until the moderators decide they aren't funny anymore. This is 100% subjective and up to the moderators reading your posts.

Individual account issues (in-game banning, problems with your account, GM issues) go through customer support emails or in private messages. If there is a serious problem with customer support, please contact a community person.

Moderation is not ever a topic for open forum. If you have any questions or feedback on moderation it should be addressed to the community manager or the specific moderator via private message.

Do not post threads questioning moderation. Such threads will be removed

If a topic is closed or removed do not, under any circumstances, re-post the same topic or material. If you have any questions as to why a thread was closed or removed please contact the moderator via private message.

For more knowledge on how to interact on the Internet, we encourage you to get acquainted with standards for netiquette such as RFC 1855.